source: 9/11 Blogger
By Peter Phillips
The corporate media in the United States are ignoring valid news
stories, based on university quality research. It appears that certain
topics are simply forbidden inside the mainstream corporate media
today. To openly cover these news stories would stir up questions
regarding “inconvenient truths” that many in the US power structure
want to avoid.
For example, current research indicates that public schools in the
United States are more segregated today than they have been in more
than four decades. According to a new Civil Rights report, published
at the University of California, Los Angeles, schools in the US are 44
percent non-white, and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority
of public school students in the US. Latinos and blacks, the two
largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than
during the civil rights movement forty years ago. Millions of non-
white students are locked into “dropout factory” high schools, where
huge percentages do not graduate. The most severe segregation in
public schools occurs in the Western states, including California; not
in the South, as many people believe. Most non-white schools are
segregated by poverty as well as race. Schools in low-income
communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified
teachers, and curriculum.
Other taboo stories include civilian death rates in Iraq and questions
on 9/11. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and a professional
survey company in Great Britain, Opinion Research Business (ORB)
report that the United States is directly responsible for over one
million Iraqi deaths since our invasion six and half years ago. In a
January 2008 report, ORB reported that, “survey work confirms our
earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a
result of the conflict which started in 2003. We now estimate that
the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have
been of the order of 1,033,000.” A 2006 Johns Hopkins study confirmed
that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third
of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly
attributable to US forces. Iraqi civilian death levels in the summer
of 2009 likely now exceed 1.2 million.
Former Brigham Young University physics professor Dr. Steven E. Jones
and some 700 scientific professionals in the fields of architecture,
engineering, and physics have now concluded that the official
explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings
is implausible according to laws of physics. Especially troubling is
the collapse of WTC 7, a forty-seven-story building that was not hit
by planes, yet dropped in its own “footprint” in 6.6 seconds in the
same manner as a controlled demolition. To support this theory, Jones
and eight other scientists conducted chemical research on the dust
from the World Trade centers. Their research results were published in
a peer-reviewed scientific journal Open Chemical Physics Journal,
Volume 2, 2009. The authors write, “We have discovered distinctive red/
gray chips in all the samples. The properties of these chips were
analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM),
X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning
calorimetry (DSC). The red portion of these chips is found to be an
unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.” Thermite is a
pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which
produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction and
is used in controlled demolitions of buildings.
Each of these taboo news stories is based on solid scholarly research.
These stories represent the failure of the corporate media in the US
to keep the American people democratically informed on important
issues. This lack of coverage of critical and potentially political
news stories is what many thousands of people in the US are now
calling a Truth Emergency. Political activists at all levels must
support full news transparency as an important component of building a
non-exploitative world based on democracy, truthfulness, and human
rights.
Peter Phillips is Professor Sociology at Sonoma State University,
President of Media Freedom Foundation http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/
and the former director of Project Censored http://www.projectcensored.org/
Daily non-corporate independent news is now on-line at: http://mediafreedom.pnn.com/13160-validated-independent-news4
